Both contenders in Sri Lanka’s presidential election are campaigning for peace. The similarities end there

WHEN Chandrika Kumaratunga was elected president in 1994, many Sri Lankans were euphoric. She promised to settle the long war against an army composed of the angriest elements of Sri Lanka's Tamil minority. Her election offered relief from the sometimes brutal 17-year rule of the party she had defeated. She may be re-elected on December 21st, but the euphoria is gone. Mrs Kumaratunga has disappointed those who expected her to raise the tone of Sri Lanka's democracy. The economy is drooping. Not only does the war continue, but Sri Lanka has lately been losing it.

The two main candidates—Ranil Wickremesinghe, head of the United National Party (UNP), is the other—seem to realise that it behoves the next president to lick all the country's main problems. They do not disagree strongly over the basic principles for doing so. Any settlement of the war that keeps Sri Lanka whole, they seem to agree, will involve devolution of power to the north and east, where most aggrieved Tamils live, and talks with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the army that presses their cause through warfare and terrorism. Both candidates lean to pro-market economic policies. The UNP has been the party of liberal economics and, originally at least, of ethnic parity. Mrs Kumaratunga's Sri Lanka Freedom Party, the core of the ruling People's Alliance, traditionally champions socialism and the Sinhalese majority, yet she has pulled the party towards the centre. The two main parties split the Sinhalese vote and must therefore court minorities. It is not a system that usually rewards extremism.

The differences are largely of personality. Mrs Kumaratunga is the charismatic scion of the Bandaranaike family, which is to Sri Lanka in some ways what the Gandhi family is to India. She is better at charming the masses, though, than at building support for her policies and executing them. Mr Wickremesinghe, nephew of a former Sri Lankan president and himself a former prime minister, is regarded as an uninspiring technocrat. The candidates have doused each other in vitriol, with Mrs Kumaratunga accusing Mr Wickremesinghe of offering to hand over part of the country to the Tigers, and Mr Wickremesinghe retorting by offering to hand over Mrs Kumaratunga instead.

The mud is not merely verbal. Each side has accused the other of instigating violence, and at least five people have been killed. Mrs Kumaratunga has stretched the prerogatives of incumbency, offering higher pensions to government workers and trying, without success, to confine most election coverage to the state-run media. Pundits predict a close race. There are fears that ballot-box fraud and intimidation will deliver the margin of victory and that violence will follow.

Ostensibly, the election is about peace. Mrs Kumaratunga called it a year early because, she said, parliament refused to enact a set of constitutional changes designed to placate the Tamil minority. But her idea, and others proposed by the principals, suffers from abstraction on crucial points that makes it look more like posters for peace than blueprints.

The constitutional changes would be radical. They would transfer most of the president's powers to a Westminster-style prime minister. They would change Sri Lanka from a unitary state into a union of regions, which would gain control over health and education, and at least some influence over the police and their finances. Tamils would thus run most of their affairs in the northern and eastern parts of the country, which they regard as their homeland. The largest Tamil party in parliament supports the changes, with reservations. Mrs Kumaratunga's plan had been to follow up a presidential victory with a parliamentary poll, which might give her the two-thirds majority she needs to change the constitution. But even if her plan comes off, she seems likely to lack the support needed to turn devolution into peace.

The UNP has rejected the changes, saying Sri Lanka's unitary character should be preserved, though the north-east could have more powers than other parts of the country. Without the UNP's support, the government is unlikely to weather opposition from those Sinhalese who will regard concessions to the Tigers or to the Tamil community as a whole as a betrayal of Sri Lanka's character as a haven for Sinhalese culture and the Buddhist religion. As for the Tigers, the president has vacillated between negotiating with them and trying to crush them. She has succeeded in neither. The army recaptured Jaffna, the main northern city, early in her tenure. Last month, though, the Tigers, revived, overran feebly defended positions in the north. This week they have been attacking Elephant Pass, Jaffna's sole land link to the rest of the country. In his “Martyrs' Day” message in November, the Tigers' leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, described Mrs Kumaratunga's term in office as a “curse on the Tamil people”.

A victory by Mr Wickremesinghe would feel more like a fresh start. He proposes to defer grand schemes for peace in favour of an “interim council”, in which he hopes the Tigers would play a role. But Mr Prabhakaran has rejected more generous offers in the past. He says he is willing to talk again, but only after the Sri Lankan army leaves the province. Many Sri Lankans harbour the suspicion that politicians see less profit in success than in blaming each other for failure.

If that is so, it is partly because for most Sri Lankans most of the time, the war itself is an abstraction. Except when a bomb explodes in Colombo, southerners are shielded by distance and by censorship. The costs to Sri Lanka have been huge. Some 60,000 people have died since 1983, when the war began, and perhaps 800,000, out of a population of 19m, have been displaced. The Institute of Policy Studies in Colombo has calculated the cumulative cost of the war at 170% of the country's 1996 GDP, including property destroyed, money spent on the army, damage to tourism, foreign investment forgone and so on. Defence spending has jumped from 1% of GDP in 1982 to about 6% in the past decade. The deaths and the rubble are mostly in the north and east; Sri Lankans in the rest of the country do not notice the cost in missed opportunities. The war also provides governments with an excuse for avoiding difficult economic measures (see article).

Any serious peace effort will confront Sri Lanka's leaders with questions that would stump even the most enlightened statesman. If devolution actually happens, what will be the fate of the Sinhalese and Muslim minorities left in a Tamil-controlled north-east province? After South Asia's bloody history of partitions, Sinhalese nationalists are not eager to find out. Could the Tigers, which have no political wing and have been murdering Tamil moderates, provide humane government or even policing to a Tamil province? Would they step aside for political parties that could? Sri Lankans cannot expect answers on the first day the newly elected president takes office. They should expect an honest attempt to find some.